The OE infinitive and its further development. The rise of the gerund.

The Infinitive had no verbal gram categories. Being a verbal noun by origin, it had a sort of reduced case-system: 2 forms which roughly corresponded to the Nom. And the Dat. Cases of nouns. The preposition to was usedto show direction or purpose.

In ME the Infinitive lost the Dative Case (the inflected form) and only one form was left: e.g. ME (to) writen. Particle to remained in NE as a formal sign of the infinitive with no meaning of direction or purpose.

Gerund appears in the 12th century. OE verbal noun (отглагольное сущ) with suffix —ung, -ing and P1 overlapped (частично совпад); verbal noun later turned into Gerund and could 1) take direct object (ex. buying the book) - verbal feature; 2) preceded by article or possessive pronoun – nominal (именной) feature. The gerund can be traced to three sources: the OE verbal noun in -uns and -ins, the Present Participle and the Infinitive. In OE the verbal noun derived from transitive verbs took an object in the Gen. case, which corresponded to the direct object of the finite(личных) verb. The syntactic functions of the verbal noun, the infinitive and the participle partly overlapped.

This verbal feature — a direct object as well as the frequent absence of article before the -ing-form functioning, as a noun — transformed the verbal noun into a Gerund in the modern understanding of the term. The nominal features, retained from the verbal noun, were its syntactic functions and the ability to be modified by a possessive pronoun or a noun in the Gen. case.

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